Eastside students learn about racism, yesterday and today

Juniors at Eastside High School gathered for a Black History Month assembly and discussed racism in the community.

By Jackie AlexanderStaff writer

As the photographs of bloated and hanging black bodies filled the screen, Eastside High School students gasped.

This, they were told Wednesday morning, is the gruesome part of the civil rights struggle, something they may not have sufficiently learned.

"This isn't Rosa Parks not going to the back of the bus or George Washington Carver and some peanuts," said Marvin Dunn of Florida International University.

Juniors at Eastside High School gathered for a Black History Month assembly and discussed racism in the community.

The discussion could not have been more timely, considering events last week surrounding a racially charged video posted by two then-students at Gainesville High School.

Students talked in small groups after Dunn's presentation about the face of racism today. The conversations invariably turned to the video.

"It's not just racism, it's ignorance," said Elizabeth Osmun, 17, adding that only education could help stem the tide of racism.

Alayna Mills, 17, said the two teenage girls, who have since withdrawn from GHS, did not think of the ramifications of posting the video, which went viral and has received more than 200,000 Internet hits.

"They put it out there," she said, "and they didn't care about other people's feelings."

Despite that video and others like it on the Internet, Dunn said he still believes that the younger generation will make a difference in combating racism.

"There will always be a certain element in our society that are bigots and racist," he said. "This is an anomaly. It is an aberration."

Dunn uses horrific incidents from the past to educate the youngsters, and the keystone of his talk Wednesday was the event that has come to be called the Rosewood massacre.

The city of Rosewood, which was a prosperous predominantly black town in coastal Levy County, was burned to the ground in January 1923 by a white mob angry that a black man had allegedly attacked a white woman.

Two white men were killed attempting to apprehend the man, igniting a frenzy in nearby white communities that left six black residents dead.

Dunn, who has been directing an archaeological investigation in Rosewood funded by the Florida Humanities Council, has filmed a documentary about the town. He showed the students two artifacts from the Rosewood site: A railroad spike and ashes from a burned Masonic lodge.

As he showed photographs of lynchings, students gasped.

"This was the underside of African-American history," said Principal Jeff Charbonnet. "It's hard to look at it, because it's real."

Dunn showed a picture of a baby being inducted into the Ku Klux Klan. "That's how racism perpetuates," he said. "You aren't born racist. That is taught to you from the cradle."

Students also learned about the Newberry Six, five black men and a pregnant woman lynched along Highway 26 in 1916. One man, Boisey Long, had been accused of hog stealing and killed the constable when a mob of men apprehended him.

Dunn said his upbringing drives him to uncover acts of racial violence, like the murder of Emmett Till, a Chicago 14-year-old who was killed in Mississippi in 1955 after flirting with a white woman.

"I will never forget seeing that photograph in Jet magazine," he said.

He didn't want students to be angry or feel guilty for the events of the past, Dunn said.

"It's history," he said. "The more information you have, the less vulnerable you are to ignorance."

Charbonnet said he met with Dunn and discussed how they could implement a school-wide effort to confront racism and bigotry.

"In a school as diverse as Eastside, it's important to begin to get the entire community to communicate," he said.

People looking at Eastside mistakenly assume the school is segregated with the International Baccalaureate program and magnet tracks carrying the weight of the school while the mainstream students are under-educated, Alayna Mills said.

"People are very intertwined," she said. "We all contribute a lot to the school's high (test) scores."

Elizabeth Osmun said spending the day talking about racism helps prepare students.

"We're taking this day to look at the past,'' she said, "so we are armed to counteract other people's ignorance."